#0388 "Home TO BE!"

This was our farm as it appeared in the spring of 1989. At the time I had no idea that we would actually be living there and what life was going to be like starting in 1993 - wonderful is the answer. We were simply assisting a friend by taking her black Labrador for a walk in the fields.

The fields and the forests of the Oak Ridges Moraine are special beyond belief. My son and I walked for hours with that big, black dog named "Clay". This hilly land was just west of Schomberg on the 12th Concession of King Township and a kilometer north of Hammertown and the 17th Sideroad. There was always something interesting to see.

We bought the farm (so to speak as we did not die) in March 1993. What an adventure. The farm house had been empty for a few years. Vandals had broken windows and doors. Frogs and snakes lived in the mud-floored basement and crawled through cracks in the stone foundation. The heat exchanger on the furnace was cracked. Cluster flies swarmed everywhere. The balloon framing of wood-house used long, vertical 2" x 4"s for the exterior walls. These long "studs" extended uninterrupted from the sill on top of the foundation, all the way up to the roof. There was no insulation in those walls. The home needed some attention. We loved it.

Looking east at Watershed Farm from a couple of hills back..

The front yard drained to Lake Simcoe and this pond drained to Lake Ontario. I named this special place Watershed Farm and started keeping bees and looking after the land and planting forests. I put up a few hundred bird houses. Nature returned to those rolling hills.

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